ChatGPT blamed for U.S. murder-suicide in lawsuit

The OpenAI logo is displayed on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen with output from ChatGPT, March 21, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

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The estate of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman filed a wrongful death lawsuit Thursday against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the ChatGPT chatbot fueled her son’s paranoid delusions and contributed to her murder.

Suzanne Adams was beaten and strangled to death by her 56-year-old son Stein-Erik Soelberg on August 3, in their Old Greenwich home, according to the complaint filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco. Soelberg then fatally stabbed himself.

The case joins a growing number of wrongful death lawsuits filed against OpenAI in recent months, with several alleging ChatGPT contributed to users’ suicides.

In August, the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine of Southern California sued OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT advised their son on suicide methods.

Several U.S. lawsuits filed in November alleged ChatGPT manipulated users into dependency and self-harm, with four also involving suicide deaths.

Among them, the family of 26-year-old Joshua Enneking alleged the chatbot provided detailed answers about acquiring a gun after he expressed suicidal thoughts.

The family of 17-year-old Amaurie Lacey claimed ChatGPT instructed him on “how to tie a noose and how long he would live without breathing.”

The latest lawsuit alleges that months of conversations with ChatGPT validated and amplified Soelberg’s delusional thinking, ultimately singling out his mother as a threat.

“ChatGPT told him he had ‘awakened’ the AI chatbot into consciousness,” the complaint states, citing videos Soelberg posted to social media.

The conversations revealed that “ChatGPT eagerly accepted every seed of Stein-Erik’s delusional thinking and built it out into a universe that became Stein-Erik’s entire life,” the lawsuit alleges.

The suit claims the chatbot reinforced Soelberg’s paranoid beliefs, telling him he was being watched and that his mother’s printer was a monitoring device.

When Soelberg expressed concerns that his mother had tried to poison him, ChatGPT allegedly validated these fears rather than challenging them.

“This is an incredibly heartbreaking situation, and we will review the filings to understand the details,” a spokesperson for OpenAI said Thursday in response to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit accuses OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of rushing its GPT-4o model to market in May 2024, compressing months of safety testing into one week over objections from safety team members.

While more powerful and human-like than its predecessors, the GPT-4o model was widely criticized for being too sycophantic with users, a point made in the lawsuit.

Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s biggest shareholder, is named as a defendant for allegedly approving the product’s release despite knowing safety protocols had been truncated.

Twenty unnamed OpenAI employees and investors are also named as defendants.

The complaint seeks unspecified damages and an injunction requiring OpenAI to implement safeguards.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.